Thoughts on Thin Computing, Latency, Minimization, Solaris and Multiplicity ...of...it...all Isaac's musings

Is today the last Sunday for Sun?

Between this week's Jonathan's comforting note to Sun employees suggesting we all light a candle and the grim feelings on the Sun tombstone expressed in Jim's blog - one key realization that I personally am feeling rests in quite the opposite way with which I choose to view Sun's position today. Hopefully it isn't just me.

Without enumerating Sun's contributions to the industry and undeniable product positioning  - one fact remains undisputable - and that is that the winds of change were blowing. And now those winds are here, the change is being fulfilled.
What is changing, however, is not as much what gave Sun its reputation and respect over the last 2+ decades, but the organizational approach to putting together bits of the strategy for (and executing) the process of running Sun profitably.

Oracle has made public statements that indicate intentions to continue (and in some cases, increase) investing in key product areas that had earned Sun its reputation over time - Java, Solaris, SPARC, MySQL, etc.
How can something that's got legs be dead?

Somehow I have trouble reconciling those thoughts with the thought of a tombstone...

And while lighting a candle or looking at a tombstone might be a worth a moments notice, I am certainly of the opinion that any extended grievance (or capturing and carrying the image thereof on a shirt or a mug) is
not how I (and probably many of you) would like to think of celebrating the confluence, the effective condensation of operating system, middle-ware software and hardware for delivering better business systems.

Sun is not dead - it is going through an evolution of being acquired because it is a living, breathing organization.  We are still having our monthly New York City OpenSolaris user community group meeting this Thursday! So is the NYJavaSIG (next week)

Oracle is going for, and stands to gain Sun's innovations and intellectual capital, products, customers and employees. Maybe time will prove differently - but today, with 11 amazing years at Sun at my back,  looking at it through the bright candle light lit by a grave is ...not something that I concur with. Its not denial - naturally, organizational directions will dictate the future. One thing is almost always certain, change is inevitable. I am just not sure I agree with the idea of a R.I.P. being applied to such an industry-shaping move.

So in concert with many others, I am moving forward, looking toward the red horizon where the oracles are planning Sun.Next

Yestday's world cup qualifier soccer match between Ireland and France sure ended with quite a stir, particularly due to the 1986 Maradona-like handling of the ball by one of France's strikers that gave France a 2-1 lead over Ireland.  The striker actually admits to having instinctively handled the ball in the penalty area and it is FIFA's inflexibility to leverage the available technology that's most interesting and disappointing to soccer fans like myself.  Read the full story on Yahoo... How difficult would it be to have a thin client like a Sun Ray placed behind every goalie's net, allowing a referee to watch an instant replay with the use of their smart card right then and there?  Maybe it will take a few years, but it is surely something that could easily be accomplished today. Sad that it will take process and people to let a ready product be useful in securely and cost-efficiently replaying what actually transpires. A loss for many sports fans until it does happen.

They say wine is made by taking a bunch of grapes and crushing them together ...to produce great tasting results (in most cases). California is the number 1 state in wine production in the US.  How interesting, then, is the following: A few holiday weekends ago I walked into a local liquor store (to do a Solaris deep-dive) and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw a bottle of South African Shiraz with a label: "Oracle of the Sun".  Although the Shakespearean reference to "What's in a name?" blazed through my mind at first, I instantly gravitated toward buying a bottle! Now, I have not opened it yet and shall probably be tasting it in the near future at one of the upcoming personal events.  In the meantime, I searched for it on the 'net and found it being sold here (among, likely, many other places).  How interesting, indeed.

We held an action-packed event this past week at Sun offices in Somerset, NJ and New York City, NY - the recent in the semi-annual Developer Days series (Part XII) that we had started in 2004. Those of you that had attended - a sincere thank you!

Based on the types of feedback I've heard from attendees, it had been very well received. Many of you have shared your positive reactions regarding the content that various members of Sun's engineering organizations have contributed and flew in to share at events of this sort.  A good number of customer meetings were held one-on-one in parallel, and we encourage you to take advantage of events like these to reach out to the engineering community. As promised, all of the presentations from the event have been posted and are available as one compressed file here

Just to recap, the agenda that we followed is listed below. 

• Agenda
> 9:15am Welcome Back, Quick Sun Update – Isaac Rozenfeld
> 9:30am Evolution of the Network stack – Markus Flierl/Sunay Tripathi
> 10:30am x86 Fast Reboot & Power Aware Dispatcher – Sherry Moore
> 11:30am Resource Mgmt & Virtualization Update – Steve Lawrence
> 12:30pm Lunch
> 1:00pm Installation Updates – David Miner
> 2:00pm Solaris 10 5/09 Highlights & Directions – Isaac Rozenfeld
> 2:50pm Technology Case Studies – Peter Galvin
> 3:50pm Reliability for the Cloud – Hal Stern
> 4:45pm Q&A/Raffle

Special hats off to Peter Galvin of Corporate Technologies for presenting and helping sponsor the event!

Please do stay tuned for more announcements, as we intend to continue holding these types of events for customers and community.  Additionally, if you are interested in keeping an eye on what's going on in the NY area with OpenSolaris and Solaris technologies, take a stroll to the monthly-held meetings at the NYC OpenSolaris User Group

'till next time!

This week I am attending an annual insurance industry event, IASA 2009, in Orlando, Florida. On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I had teamed up with Paul Dolbec, along with our colleagues from CSC, to represent the joint partnership between Sun and CSC at this important business conference. The event ran from Sunday through Wednesday, and like many other events of this type had a few components: educational sessions, CIO/CFO  roundtable and an exhibit hall.  While the exhibit hall was bustling with vendors, various interesting sessions added to the true flavor of the event. Keynotes included great speakers such as Michael Eisner, Joe Theismann and Steve Gilliland. The conference was interesting in that, for me, it offered an opportunity to further understand the insurance industry, the challenges of regulations that touch various aspects of accounting and taxation, as well as the ever-growing impact of IT.  At the CSC booth that we put together, we were showcasing Sun's ultra-thin client technologies, demonstrating mobility with security through the use of smart-card technologies across the Sun Ray devices that we had installed at the booth. The setup, for the event's purposes, involved utilising a laptop pre-loaded with VMware ESX, running 2 virtual machines - one running Microsoft Windows XP and the other VM running Solaris 10. We had a number of simple demos setup that demonstrated the ability to rotate through individual desktop experiences serving either a Windows or a Solaris desktop.  (I am obliged to acknowledge Keith Cantrel for his assistance (during, what I imagine would've been  a quiet Sunday afternoon for him otherwise)  remotely hacking through a directory corruption issue that helped get us back up online). Thank you, Keith!!

The impact of having to reduce costs on the desktop as desktop refresh cycles come about can be tremendous, particularly when paying attention to the fact that these devices draw only about ~7 watts of power, do not have an OS that has to be managed on them and in the process appeal to use-cases such as being used in call-centers, for disaster recovery purposes, pandemic planning and remote/on-boarding process.  

As an example, CSC had been deploying Sun Ray's through their Desktop Anywhere program for quite some time now. For details, take a look here

So how does this relate to the concept of new era in computing? (Ah, the plot begins to emerge!) Just as technology continues on its path of evolution, the ultra-thin computing continues to be identified as a viable and mature opportunity for cost savings on the desktop.  If this is music to your ears, as it is to many of our existing customers, then I'd like to invite you to take a listen to Nova Era - a group of professional musicians I had met last evening after the conference, while strolling along at Downtown Disney.  Turns out they've been performing with Disney since the late 90's.  I was amazed at the sound quality and their live performance - had an opportunity to meet and talk with them in-person during a break in their performance, and was just pleased to realize that classical music lives on!  Very, very cool!

ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum event is taking place May 17-19 in Orlando, FL this year.  For those of you who may not be familiar with ACORD, the acronym stands for Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development - and is the name of a global, nonprofit standards development organization that is serving the Insurance (and related financial services) industries.

ACORD LOMA is one of the leading Insurance events in the North American insurance market, with typical attendance including representatives from many other countries.

Sun Microsystems will be located at booth #317 at this event. The themes we are focusing on at this year's event are:

Modernization (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and Virtualization);

SOA/JCAPS;

Cloud Computing for Insurance; and

Business Solutions across the Insurance Value Chain

We will have various collateral/artifacts/demos supporting these themes, and we will be happy to interact with those of you in the insurance market who are going to be attending.  You will be able to download and view the collateral here

As an example, I have been working on an integrated Sun Ray + VirtualBox demo that will highlight some of the recently released capabilities in the secure/mobile desktop computing area.  This is something that offers opportunities to decrease desktop management costs, offers data/application security and mobility and is prompting a growing number of carriers to actively look at and deploy.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Today's date is 4/20/2009  ...and if you're into numerology you'll quickly recognize that the sum of all integers is 17;  follow the yellow brick road here

The exciting news is out!  See Sun's announcement and Oracle's announcement  

While there are a number of processes to go through as part of this deal, there are lots of technologies that are merging together to deliver a more integrated platform stack to deliver the value that customers are looking for today.

Perhaps a surprise to many - the reality is that between the two companies we have a very large shared installed base across many industries. 

For the longest time, Sun and Oracle have jointly worked on integrating each other's technologies through SOATC (Sun Oracle Application Technology Center).  I, for one, have worked on a number of projects integrating Oracle's Parallel Server services (pre-RAC) and Sun Cluster technologies on top of Solaris.  Long history between the companies - lots of synergy and it'll be very interesting to see how it all begins to pan out following today's announcement.  

Earlier in January we held a Low Latency-focused Developer Day event at our New York city offices (which had been a part of a trio of similar events held in London and Toronto just prior). Slides from that event are available here

Additionally, do keep an eye out for sometime in late May, early June timeframe - when our next Developer Day [Part XII] event will likely be taking place. (We'll be planning and announcing that shortly).

As always, if there are specific technical topics you would like to hear from Sun (or our customers) at that event, please drop me a note to isaac-AT-sun-DOT-com

Rangers lost to Boston Bruins on Saturday night.  I just can't stop wishing for '94 all over again...

As I travel around the world I am constantly asked by customers about our strategy for VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure). While the VDI market itself is relatively young (albeit growing very rapidly as various technologies are establishing an edge for themselves in different aspects of VDI), a key element of the entire picture is not just data locality (which is largely a function of ever-expanding bandwidth) but the means to service access itself.  That is to say that the user of the desktop is now being more and more challenged to essentially be decoupled from the actual personal computing device and, instead, be associated with the application execution environment - ala "The Desktop".  Assumptions of data security/integrity and device access being postulates, the ever-growing need for workers to be mobile - mixed with the notion that "thin is in" to reduce cost by driving lower power consumption and reduce software operation/licensing costs - has many financial institutions investigating various alternatives. This trend is more noticeable now, as many of these companies are struggling to deal with the global economic downturn that has left many of the weaker financial players either on the sidelines or, in a better case, - acquired by stronger financial entities. This is happening now, at a time when security, operational and compliance demands are at extremely high levels. Mergers and acquisitions are a natural outcome in times like these and as financial services firms merge - newly acquired employees will need to access back-office applications from current office locations in order to maintain employee productivity across all parts of the organisation. The need to onboard newly acquired employees securely and efficiently, to provide them access to back-office applications reliably and productively, without having to undergo a costly cross organizational network integration, has never been a higher priority for the financial services market segment. 

Now, if you've been around the industry for a few years, you've probably heard a thing or two about Sun's contributions to this space - how Sun's motto that "The Network Is The Computer" actually gets translated to something meaningful for "The Desktop". Sun's innovations in this space go way back at least 10 years ago - when the research and development work of Sun Lab's engineers had culminated in a first product release of the Sun Ray unit (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray for a quick history tidbit).  One of the crucial elements of this products design is the Appliance Link Protocol (ALP) - that is responsible for the best in-class user experience - particularly demonstrateable across wide area networks (where the user's physical location is quite a distance away from where the user's desktop might be) - and the levels of patience are directly proportional to network latencies of the day.

The Sun Ray device is ultra-thin (it doesn't have an operating system and is completely stateless) - its operating as a display engine for all of the data processing that happens in the data centre. The actual bits that get sent from the data centre to the device are compressable and yield a very amenable and competitive user experience especially in  high network latency environments.  Having a Sun Ray device on your office desktop or at home does not solve today's mobility dilemma. While it is true that Sun - as well as a growing list of other companies are - is offering some of their employees a "Sun Ray at Home" program, the moment you have to travel on a train, on a plain, on a bus - is when you wish you had your "desktop" with you.  And while iPhone can deliver email and let you look at you calendar, .pdf's and spreadsheets, its just not your "desktop". So - what do you do? 

Most of us have a laptop - and while we are asked not to keep company sensitive data on our laptops - how many of us outthere really heed such advice ? How, then, do we access our applications and associated data that is managed centrally for us? We run a local OS and access that data remotely. Now what would happen if the laptop got lost or stolen? Simple - the data that we had on the laptop's hard disk is now in the hands of someone who will likely go prowling through it. Is that what we want? Ummm, no.

So, what do we do? "Elementary my dear Watson" - we move to offer an access layer on the laptop that connects you to the backend.  Then, with a broadband card available for $0 with a 2-year contract from Cingular (for example),  you access your data.  This isn't news - Citrix have done this sort of thing already.  There's a price tag associated with that, of course - and depending on where you're coming from and what you're happy to settle for this may be exactly what you're after.  But if you have a Sun Ray environment deployed what would really be interesting is to run a piece of software that gives you EXACTLY the same look and feel as if you were connecting from a Sun Ray device.  To give you that enhanced level of crossover, mobility and device indepdendence. The ability to maximize the ROI of the existing PC laptop/desktop gear that you'd invested in and have plenty of - and as you look to evaluate where Sun Ray can be deployed in your organisation, your users realise that all of a sudden they can connect and RESUME  their  session at a point EXACTLY where they'd left it the day prior - when they'd left the office for that important client meeting just hours prior.

Oh, and when they're back at the office - just have them insert the personalized secure smart card into the Sun Ray, authenticate, and resume the session EXACTLY where it'd been left off while accessing it on the laptop with a 3G modem in the airport! The increased productivity and cost savings presented by an opportunity to decrease desktop management challenges (and associated licensing costs) is only the beginning.

Sound cool? You bet it FEELS cool, too!

(Oh, maaan, I didn't even mention ZFS and solid-state disks in this context!)

Hello everyone,

Well, last week we had yet another action-packed day of events held on 2 consecutive days in NYC and in lovely Edison, NJ. Despite the cold weather and whatever it was that had been ailing me, I seem to have managed it - and apologise to any of you who may have felt that whatever has been ailing you for the past few days had been my doing. I got better, and I hope you will, too

Below are the snapshots of the agenda, along with presentations that were given by our speakers. Please note that the agenda in New Jersey had a different order flow only due to speaker availability; the content presented on both days had been identical.

AGENDA

9:30am Welcome Back, Quick Sun Update – Isaac Rozenfeld
10:00am Storage Product Update – Neal Weiss
10:45am Software Performance and Solaris Observability - Jarod Jenson of Forsythe - For a copy of this presentation please contact Forsythe directly - Marc Kreppel (mkreppel-AT-forsythe-DOT-com)
11:45am Solaris 10 10/08 [Update 6] Highlights – Isaac Rozenfeld
12:15pm xVM Server/OpsCenter Update + demo – Michael Barrett
1:15pm Lunch
1:45pm x64 Product Update – Mike Marotta/Paul Kirtland
2:15pm xVM Desktop Virtualization – Michael Barrett
3:00pm Zones & OpenSolaris Update – Jerry Jelinek
3:45pm Cloud Computing Initiative – Hal Stern
4:45pm Q&A/Raffle

...and of course, no event would be complete without Solaris 10 media give-aways. Do join us next time (probably circa the next Solaris 10 Update release - expected sometime in 2009) for yet another amazing session.  Let us know what topics you would like to hear about, too - as these events are done FOR you.  Until then, if you are interested in keeping up with what is happening in the world of Solaris and OpenSolaris (and why the two are actually ONE), check out the New York's OpenSolaris user's group.

// $ more soon

In my new role at Sun, I've started to shift my focus toward the desktop end of the datacenter spectrum. Very often I get asked the question of who is using Sun's thin client/desktop appliance technology, Sun Ray, in Financial Services. So how do Sun Ray and Sun's VDI offerings apply to Banking, Trader's desktop, Branch modernization aspects of the financial services industry?

Here are a few public successes stories particularly around FSI.

1)Bank Improves Customer Service using Sun Ray Technology. Sparkasse Haslach-Zell is a savings bank headquartered in Zell,
Germany. The bank has 11 branch offices, employs 230 people and manages EUR 900 million. Details: http://www.sun.com/customers/software/sparkasse.xml
2) Netsol/Chelsea Financial Services: Sun Ray Desktop Solution Success Story. Details: http://www.sun.com/sunray/docs/TeamNetsol082703ss.pdf
3) Savings and Credit Bank Kuwait. Kuwaiti Bank Gains a Scalable Architecture with High Availability and Efficient, Centralized Desktop Management. Details: http://www.sun.com/customers/storage/scb.xml
4) World's oldest financial services institution, in Italy, chooses Sun Ray. Details: http://www.sun.com/customers/software/banca_mps.xml
5) Reuters use of Sun Ray and Secure Global Desktop in China. Details: http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2006-10/sunflash.20061026.4.xml and http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/105/1/ClientSystems/17123

Additionally of interest should be the following:
Toronto's Center of Excellence, joint work with Sun's partner - Scalar Decisions - highlighting Sun Ray/SGD technology for next-generation trading systems. Details: http://sun.systemnews.com/articles/102/3/ClientSystems/16759

Sun Ray is not a new technology. It has been evolving over the last 10 years and arguably first appeared way ahead of its time in the early mid-90's. It has been featured in the financial services/trader press specifically:

http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/it-infrastructure/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208402360
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1889496/
http://www.cio.in/news/viewArticle/ARTICLEID=5098

And of course we have a number of financial institutions that are not comfortable being public about what they're doing. If the latest mergers and acquisitions activities in the financial services industry are of any indication into activities that happen as crucial business and IT components (datacenters, desktops, employee integration and onboarding, mobility) are undertaken, rest assured that the big names in the industry are doing quite a bit. That should read: "Quite A Bit" actually. And all for a number of good reasons:

1) Network performance vs. the competition, particularly around WAN deployments (think: Singapore to London to New York). A number of banks have done (some are doing) their own testing to see for themselves. Yes, the kind that involves serious WAN latency simulators (Shunra comes to mind). We would love to help you with yours.

2) Cost [not just acquisition but ongoing large user base management]: the per user cost for a desktop client is much less then a PC. It has a very very very very small firmware footprint, essentially NO OS running, meaning that it doesn't have to be managed for updates against viruses/malware/anything. And yes, it operates very well with your favorite Operating system and delivers awesome access to applications (Windows, Solaris, Linux, etc.). "Zero-administration" is what my next Sun t-shirt ought to say.

3) Multimedia enhancements - in cases of VDI integration, quite a bit of work has already been done using VMware's and Sun's brokering technologies to deliver access to RDP sessions - and more is in the works! There are of course a number of non-financial use cases (Verizon, Time Warner) that, although aren't part of the financial services umbrella, do resonate with the types of business units that banks have been eyeing dekstop appliances for (customer-facing counters [read: branch tellers], call centers [read: customer service agents]). Been to swap or upgrade your cable/modem service recently? At Sun, of course, we've been doing it for years, saving millions in infrastructure & maintenance (power, cooling) costs.

And, if you're ever in Singapore, please do stop by Sun's office at 1 Magazine Road for a peek at a local "Bank on Sun" showcase, featuring Sun Ray's integration with many branch-focused input devices.

Don't turn a blind eye and don't judge Sun by where we were 6-7 years ago. Instead, judge us by what we've got up our sleeve now

More soon!

Earlier this month we released OpenSolaris 2008.05 - a distribution of OpenSolaris that, so far, runs on any modern Intel/AMD/VIA processor.  This past weekend I decided to enter the fray into the
world of multiboot-ability with GRUB and see just how fun prowling the multiboot world can get! 

Thanks to lots of good documentation floating on the 'net  (that our friends at google make so easily accessible at the dyer time of need) - and most importantly thanks to our very own Partition Magician - good colleague Bob Netherton, for offering
some very inquisitive pointers at the very right time ....thus saving me from myself on more then one occasion. Bob - you r0ck!  Additionally this is one good GRUB reference I would recommend anyone beginning to tinker with GRUB.

So - what have I learned through it all?   Don't use parttype
in grub w/out having first jotted down what your disk geometry looks like - for starters.  Grub's parttype command allows you to specify the type of the partition.  Given the original PC's limitations of 4 primary partitions - and only one Solaris parition being available at any given time, it took some whimsical thinking to plow through some of the challenges that I wedged myself with right off the bat ...

What did I start off with ?

I started off with a fairly common entry-level environment - a PC that has 1 physical disk with the following partitions:

WinXP, Recovery Partition (provided by the PC vendor), Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08 (that I had previously installed), and a FAT32 partition that I have data on, that I use for sharing across the Windows and SXDE partitions.  Without knowing any better, right off the bat, I managed to wedge my PC into thinking that the FAT32 partition is now a ext3 partition...or was it ext2... or was it fat.... and not having known to just be careful about plowing head-in, I almost ran for the recovery DVD's to re-start the entire process from scratch. 

Scratch is what I did, but not the PC but my own head. It hurt quite a bit, to have to realise that the only way forward was to succumb to the fact that with an innocentlly executed parttype command, a partition that was formerly known to be of one type, now could no longer be seen by anything.  OUCH. I guess I could've anticipated that - and in retrospect I am not surprised by my actions.  Thank G-D for Backups!

Now, what did I set out to achieve ?

I wanted to have a partition running with OpenSolaris 2008.05  in such a way that would still allow me to boot into SXDE and Windows XP.  There can only be one Solaris parition on a disk, and so the trickery that is involved is (although well documented by Bob here) still needs to take place. And with the version of GRUB that OpenSolaris comes with, relying on the reviously only-supplied-by-Fedora Core-version-of-Grub on this machine was not necessary.

I ended up deleting (in a planned fashion) a Recovery Partition and shrinking the Windows XP partition, to combine a 11GB worth of disk space to be made available to OpenSolaris. Now, it doesn't really need that much - only about 3GB or so, but I know I'll be installing various types of packages over time so thought may as well have the space available now.  I had formatted that newly created partition into ext3 (Linux) for the purposes of then relying on Grub to act as a switch between ext3 and Solaris.  Because of the limitation that there can only be one Solaris partition (not sure where that comes from - if anyone knows, please feel free to comment - I haven't googled this yet , the boot process entails making the Solaris partition that you want to boot into the active one, anytime you want to boot into it.

To install OpenSolaris 2008.05, what I had to do was to, prior to loading the OpenSolaris LiveCD into memory, jump out at the GRUB screen and instruct  GRUB to take the ext3 partition and convert it into a Solaris partition. At the same time, I had to instruct GRUB to convert the existing Solaris partition (that has my SXDE OS image loaded on it) into a ext3 partition.  The syntax for that (as is on my PC) looks like this:

grub> hd0, <HIT TAB>

<you get a screenfull of currently defined partitions, then:>

parttype (hd0,1) 0xbf

parttype (hd0,3) 0x83

root(hd0,1)

makeactive

What this does is it takes the 1st partition on the 0th disk (everyone starts their counting differently, Grub too - so don't grub it the wrong way else you're in for a treat!)

The geometry (hd0) command comes in handy, too.  My map looked like the following, prior to installing OpenSolaris:

hd0,0 - 0x7 (NTFS) 

hd0,1 - 0x83 (ext2fs)

hd0,3 - 0xbf (Solaris/ufs)

hd0,4 - 0xb (FAT)

After the installation of OpenSolaris into this multiboot environment, what I ended up with is a map that essentially looks like this:

hd0,0 - 0x7 NTFS

hd0,1 - 0x83 OpenSolaris

hd0,3 - 0x83 (zfs)

hd0,4 - 0xb (FAT)

title OpenSolaris 2008.05 Release - snv_86

	parttype (hd0,1) 0xbf

	parttype (hd0,3) 0x83

	root (hd0,1)

	makeactive

	chainloader +1

Right now the user experience looks something like this. By default the system comes up and gives me a choice whether to boot into OpenSolaris, Windows or Solaris Express Developer Edition.

If I opt to boot into the Solaris Express Developer Edition, the following command is executed behind the scenes and I am presented with the following screen - which is being read from the other Solaris partition that I have on my PC:

title Solaris Express Developer Edition 3 snv79

	parttype (hd0,1) 0x83

	parttype (hd0,3) 0xbf

	root (hd0,3)

	makeactive

	chainloader +1

Of course, bootability into Windows looks familiar and is not modified:

title Windows XP

	rootnoverify (hd0,0)

	chainloader +1

The unlucky partition that I managed to blow away was that very shareable FAT32
partition. Of course, not figuring out exactly what syntax must apply to FAT32 partitions, it took some thinking. Turns out, the help parttype syntax in Grub does not really reveal acceptable types - only the Hex range is the best I could find in the documentation - and that didn't help me.  At the end of it all, though, parttype (hd0,4) 0xb is what dresses up a partition in the FAT32 armor.  Betcha didn't know that. I didn't either... and still am somewhat not fully convinced I understand the differences between 0x6, 0x1b and 0xc - all of which appear as FAT paritions in GRUB.  But I'll leave that for another day as that lawn that I haven't touched for 2 weeks (having been out of the country on biz travel) is just beggin' for some mowin'...

Developer Days: Part X

During May 7th and 8th, in Sun's offices in NY and NJ, we had an excellent time giving updates on what Sun is doing in various engineering and field-facing organizations, fueling growth of cool technologies and solutions, especially, given our geographical location, in the financial services industry.

Below is a recap of the agenda and pertinent slides.
Please contact me if you require specifics on a customer-presented showcase highlighting "Flying Zones", and please indicate whether you would be interested in establishing a private, customer-2-customer dialogue with implementors of these technologies at CommerzBank in Frankfurt, Germany. 

Dialogues such as this are common in the industry and generally serve to benefit both private organisations.

Presentation slides can be downloaded as a bundle here

Agenda

09:00am	Welcome Back, Quick Sun Update – Ambreesh Khanna
09:05am	Solaris 10 5/08 Highlights – Isaac Rozenfeld
09:45am	SVGS (Flying Zones) – Herr Michael Bartruff, Commerzbank
10:45am	Amber Road & Greenplum (Open Storage) – Neal Weiss 
11:15pm	Solaris Network Virtualization Update  – Sunay Tripathi 
12:15pm	Lunch
1:00pm	Sun Thin Client/VDI – Isaac Rozenfeld, Amjad Khan 
1:30pm	MySQL – Philip Antoniades
2:15pm	Solaris Performance Assurance – Damien Farnham 
3:15pm	Solaris Performance Tuning – Amjad Khan 
4:00pm	HPC – Dave Teszler
4:30pm  Q&A/Raffle/Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed attending - look for more of these events to continue in the months ahead. Please let me or your local Sun contacts know what you think, and whether you would like to present about some of your interesting use-cases to others. As a bonus, if you are interested in taking a peek at what the local NY OpenSolaris User Group community is doing on a monthly basis, have a look here: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/nycosug/

Knowledge wealth is not a measure of material quantity; it is a relative measure of metadata's meaning, begging to be set free.

I often feel that people can be much more successful and productive if they share the information they know - openly.  So to do my part, I gladly welcomed an opportunity to participate in Sun's Tech Days 2008 WorldTour (details) and traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, this week, to present on some of Sun's very cool technologies (our Solaris operating environment and ZFS - two of which have recently been recognized as the Best Server OS and Best Filesystem (respectively) by InfoWorld in their annual technology review

While there, I had joined a dozen other Sun engineers, collegues and partners in a 2-day event focusing on OpenSolaris, Solaris and Sun's developer-centric technologies and tools (and we've got quite a community). The entire event took place at the Cobb Galleria Center; and the agenda was packed!

If you're a developer, an existing customer or a prospect, please do take the time to participate in these free events when they come to your town.  There were hundreds of attendees in Atlanta (I don't have the actual numbers yet) - and they all came to hear about cool Sun technologies: development tools, operating system features and services - and most improtantly, (I think), to interact and hear directly from Sun engineers involved in development of (and day-to-day activities with) these technologies. 

Speakers included (in random order) Jeet Kaul, Ian Murdock, Michael Ingrassia, Valerie Fenwick, Sowmini Varadhan, Scott Dickson, Don Deal and many others whose sessions I did not get a chance to attend. You can see the entire list of speakers and presentations from the OpenSolaris day.  I lead a session on OpenSolaris (A Definition) and on ZFS (with a focus on why developers should think of using it). Would love to hear your thoughts about these technologies and what creative uses you've come up with to entrust your business to them.

I also dived into examples of what I've dubbed Solaris Multiplicity -  a practice  of using various Solaris technologies jointly to come up with an economically malleable index representative of deriving increased levels of value for your enterprise,  rather then partially using subsets of these technologies and come up short of the full potential.

More on this soon...

1/2/2010 Update - I organized my thoughts on this further into a presentation-format available here. Whilst with examples, it takes about 1.5 hours to go through the entire deck.  I had presented it at Immersion Week (a Sun conference) in 2008. If <PG DOWN> is your key of the day, it is conceivable that you might be able to go through the slides much faster ... Your thoughts are welcomed!

Just returned from a 2-week long trip to DisneyWorld at Lake Buena Vista (about 30 min. ride from Orlando's International Airport) in Florida.  If you've been there, you'll probably agree with most of what I am about to write - else you'll (hopefully) find the below helpful in planning your trip.  Essentially, if you're family oriented and are traveling down there with kids who are at least 5+ years old, one of the things you need to do in terms of early preparation is acquire a bunch of Disney genuine pins that you'll hook your kids on (while there).  Go to ebay and search for "disney genuine pins" and buy a lot. Its cheaper this way (about $2 per pin vs. $7-$12/pin while on vacation).

Next, while there, you'll soon realize that everyone from the whole wide world is suddenly finding it necessary to travel there during the same time you're going.  That's a postulate.  So, before you go, call up the number at Disney dining services and make a few reservations at some of the restaurants they've got.  While I was there with my family, we were able to dine at Magic Kingdom's Castle as well as Norway's Akershus (in Epcot).  Both were great places, with plenty of opportunities for character photos for the young ones....  By the way, do you know what Epcot stands for?  No, its not "Every person comes out tired" nor is it "Every paycheck comes on Thursday".  One of the gents who worked there enlightened me that it actually stands for "Experimental prototype city of tomorrow".  Well,  I am glad its experimental.  There are quite a few interesting architectural decisions that had been made that result in very very crowded pathways (during the holidays) with absolutely no redundancy ...and  because the Fastpass program is so popular, the one facility they haven't adopted to be Fastpass-ready are ...restrooms

What I liked about Epcot is the fact that Disney architects have representations of 11 countries (Mexico, Japan, Norway, China, Italy, US, Germany, UK, France, Canada, Morocco) comprising about 60% of the park (my estimate) with the remaining 40% being dedicated to various attractions - and the whole theme of Epcot is about our planet, the world, unity, energy sources, etc.  The Bakery in France is absolutely amazing.  Must have the strawberry tart and the cake of the day.  Follow that up with a visit to their souvenir shop and walk away with a number of French gifts.  Make your way into Italy and Japan and savor some of the local specialties.  See the acrobats perform in China and visit Germany for a playful OktoBeerfest   If you're going onto the Maelstorm ride in Norway, remember to watch the 5-minute film about the country, following the ride.

The Animal Kingdom hasn't changed much since we visited it last in 2005, except that there's a new ride (Everest) and a seemingly much more developed Asia section.  Didn't ride on Everest, so can't comment on it, but the restaurant Yak & Yeti (Hi Alessandra!) (right by the Flying  Wonders [a bird show]) is a must!   Make a reservation if you can - lunch at about 3pm works well if you started your day late.  Earlier on, as you walked into the park, you (hopefully) caught the Pocahontas show (on the left side of the park) and then immediately thereafter, you've probably spent 1 hour in total waiting for autographs with each of the 4 characters that are there pretty much throughout sunlight.  The cool thing about the Animal Kingdom is that it closes early (I think that's because of the heavy presence of animals and preserving their peace) and so you may still have plenty of time after 8pm to hop a ride down to Disney downtown.

While there, you must visit the Magic Masters. You must eat at the Wolfgang Puck's and have a tomato soup and sandwich at Earl of Sandwich.  You must visit the Disney Pin Traders area - and you have to wonder into the World of Disney shop.  If you're into Cirque, they're there -  at Downtown Disney. And if you're there on multiple evenings, try to visit the Fulton's Crab House (by parking area 1).

Other then that, the Magic Kingdom is a wonderful place for all ages. Lots of popcorn and sun sure make for a fun-filled vacation.  The Noodle Station serves up some very very tasty varieties so if you're into noodles, you'll likely enjoy a bowl of veggie/tofu/chicken.

As for beating the crowds, make sure you're there bright and early, do your homework the night before (visit the Guest Services counter at each park to obtain the schedule of events/shows for any of the 4 theme parks at DisneyWorld).  There  is no substitute for having the ParkHopper option, but my personal experience dictates that at $45/person, its an option only worth having at Disneyland, California and not Disneyworld, Florida, because in Disneyland, the 2 parks are close to each other - you can hop between them easily. At Disneyworld, you'll likely spend a day at one park (there's lots to do) and you'll likely not going to want to go to another park in the middle of the day.  Not unless you're in that park for the 3rd day during your stay - this has been my experience.

Bring a stroller, if you can.   With the time spent waiting in lines to rent a stroller, and having to return it and then having the kid being tired by the day's end, plus at $8 to rent a stroller ($16 for a double) and being there for 7 days, the math quickly adds up! 

 
...and repeat after me: "Its a Small World After All"....

 
Cheers and Happy New Year to all!